Hi all

I’m on the council of a small professional society. We need to make some decisions which we didn’t have time to make at the quarterly council meeting. Another chap and myself have been give the task of looking into how this might be done online. There are about 15 people on the council, the original idea was to get everyone online at one time and have an online discussion/decision making session, using some sort of forum/email/facebook/collaboration site etc.
On looking into it, its begins to look like this might not be such an easy thing to do. Getting everybody’s point of view across effectively in a short time and then taking everything that’s been said into account isn’t straight forward.
So I thought I’d ask here, to see what the collective STW wisdom was.
We don’t have a facilitator. There is no central IT resource. It has to be free/cheap. Most participants won’t have access to video/webcams.

Not asking a lot, am I? Any thoughts?

many thanks

Colin

something like webex will do the job…

http://www.webex.co.uk/

Free trial for 14 days too.

just use msn messenger or skype surely?

doesnt msn have a “white board” function that everyone can draw on?

Google Wave

Well, I don’t mean Google for the word “wave”, I mean use Google Wave…

We occasionally have to do something simillar with about 6 of us.
Tried chat-rooms etc. Ended up conferencing calling. I’m sure there’s something called “One-note” thats part of Office, that’s like an online whiteboard. But we all needed Office to do it.
We use Web-Ex’s at work a lot, but its a faff.

And this is why I don’t do committees any more !! It’s not a technical issue its a procedural issue. The chairperson needs to outline the options and people vote for or against, and never finish the meeting without the decisions. If that doesn’t work have some easy yes/no questions via survey monkey. And if that doesn’t work, he/she makes the decisions.

If you can’t all decide when in the same room you don’t have a hope of doing it virtually sorry, somebody in your organisation needs to stop pansying about. Again with apologies for being blunt but have seen a lot of this kind of thing over the years ! Technology just clouds the issues.

I read an article on something similar a while back – working in remote / virtual teams. I’ll see if I can find it, scan and email it to you.

One suggestion they had was using forum based discussions for decision making.

Team leader sets up a discussion thread and a timescale (eg: a week).
Other members have the chance to make their comments / observations in that timescale. No comment / participation by any team member is taken to mean agreement / no opinion.
At the end of the timescale, team leader either summarises consensus and decides therefore on the appropriate action, or if there is still considerable disagreement you either then table it as a specific topic for the next meeting or have a teleconference to cover just that topic.

The benefit is that by having these discussions online rather than at general meetings, people can participate in only the topics they have interest in (how many of us sit through swathes of agenda topics that we have no opinion / say in); and it also enables face-to-face meetings to concentrate on the areas that need discussion rather than those where everyone broadly agrees but it still takes ages while everyone takes the chance to say why they agree with everyone else.